Four individuals with complex neurological conditions have, for the first time, taken part in a live musical performance with a string quartet. The film of this ground-breaking musical performance will premiere at Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival 2016. It showcases an extraordinary project led by Plymouth University and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability which saw four patients at the Hospital perform Activating Memory as part of The Paramusical Ensemble. Using Brain Computer Music Interfacing technology developed at Plymouth University they were able to generate musical scores in real-time for a string quartet to play.
It is a key development in Plymouth University’s four year EPSRC-funded research programme and follows the 2014 premiere of Professor Eduardo Reck Miranda’s Activating Memory at Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival with the Bergesen String Quartet and an able-bodied BCMI quartet. ‘Activating Memory’ was subsequently performed at the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego, USA, in September 2015.